of tears;—­the Temptation in the wilderness, with its passionate contrast of the grey-robed Man of Sorrows and the ruby-winged, voluptuous fiend;—­the Temptation of Adam in Eden, a glowing allegory of the fascination of the spirit by the flesh;—­Paradise, a tempest of souls, whirled like Lucretian atoms or gold dust in sunbeams by the celestial forces that perform the movement of the spheres;—­the Destruction of the world, where all the fountains and rivers and lakes and seas of earth have formed one cataract, that thunders with cities and nations on its rapids down a bottomless gulf; while all the winds and hurricanes of the air have grown into one blast, that carries men like dead leaves up to judgment;—­the Plague of the fiery serpents, with multitudes encoiled and writhing on a burning waste of sand;—­the Massacre of the Innocents, with its spilth of blood on slippery pavements of porphyry and serpentine;—­the Delivery of the tables of the law to Moses amid clouds on Sinai, a white ascetic, lightning-smitten man emerging in the glory of apparent godhead;—­the anguish of the Magdalen above her martyred God;—­the solemn silence of Christ before the throne of Pilate;—­the rushing of the wings of Seraphim, and the clangour of the trumpet that awakes the dead;—­these are the soul-stirring themes that Tintoretto handles with the ease of mastery.[284]

Meditating upon Tintoretto’s choice of such subjects, we feel that the profoundest characteristic of his genius is the determination toward motives pre-eminently poetic rather than proper to the figurative arts.  The poet imagines a situation in which the intellectual or emotional life is paramount, and the body is subordinate.  The painter selects situations in which physical form is of the first importance, and a feeling or a thought is suggested.  But Tintoretto grapples immediately with poetical ideas; and he often fails to realise them fully through the inadequacy of painting as a medium for such matter.  Moses, in the drama of the “Golden Calf,” for instance, is a poem, not a true picture.[285] The pale ecstatic stretching out emaciated arms, presents no beauty of attitude or outline.  Energy of thought is conspicuous in the figure; and reflection is needed to bring out the purpose of the painter.[286]

It is not, however, only in the region of the vast, tempestuous, and tragic that Tintoretto finds himself at home.  He is equal to every task that can be imposed upon the imagination.  Provided only that the spiritual fount be stirred, the jet of living water gushes forth, pure, inexhaustible, and limpid.  In his “Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne,” that most perfect lyric of the sensuous fancy from which sensuality is absent;[287] in his “Temptation of Adam,” that symphony of grey and brown and ivory more lustrous than the hues of sunset; in his “Miracle of S. Agnes,” that lamb-like maiden with her snow-white lamb among the soldiers and the priests of Rome, Tintoretto has proved beyond all question that the fiery genius of Titanic artists can pierce and irradiate the placid and the tender secrets of the soul with more consummate mastery than falls to the lot of those who make tranquillity their special province.[288]